In praise of universities

This week the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a hard right free market think tank, produced a report entitled ‘Lackademia: why do academics lean left?’ It claims – and treats as a problem – that “left-liberals” are “over-represented” in British academia. The methodology used to establish the political views of academics was risible, being based on a self-selecting survey (what survey methodologists call a ‘voodoo poll’) and this and other flaws were pointed out by John Morgan in the Times Higher Education.

Even if the data were more robust, it is a bizarre notion that academics’ political views should be ‘representative’ of the general population and that, if they are not, they are, to use the report’s word “skewed”. Academics are not appointed for their political views, or to represent anyone under some kind of proportional representation system – and it would be disastrous if they were appointed in this way, rather than on the basis of their academic expertise. But the choice of the term ‘over-representation’ is deliberate, as signalled in the closing line of the full report – it tries to take the language of diversity (in relation to gender, class and ethnicity) in order to imply, although there is absolutely no evidence of this, that those on the political right are victims of discrimination so that whilst being qualified for academic posts they are excluded from them.

The word ‘victims’ is significant in understanding what is going on here, which is a species of the populist politics sweeping Western societies. That populism has at its heart a victim narrative in which the ‘liberal elite’ (sometimes the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’) has a fiendish power to do down the common sense of ‘the people’. It is a nonsensical reading of where power lies, since the intellectual apparatchiks of recent decades are more obviously the ASI and similar neo-liberal bodies than anyone else, but after the events of the last year no one can doubt its traction. Another part of the populist wave is its anti-intellectualism, with ‘experts’ being denounced and even compared to Nazis. So the ASI report channels that strand of populism, too.

The populist implications of the ASI report were quite apparent in the way it got picked up in the media. Especially grotesque was a spiteful piece by Tom Utley in, inevitably, the Daily Mail. It started with a long whine about having been put down by his ‘left-wing’ tutor at Cambridge (like so many of the populist Right – Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg - Utley is a product of ‘elite’ universities) some forty years ago.  The ‘put down’ was, in fact, a correction of his misunderstanding about the subject under discussion – as it happens John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ concept, discussed on p. 146 of my book - although Utley clearly doesn’t realise this and it apparently still rankles.

The rest of the article is a series of tendentious assertions (e.g. cherry picked examples of Oxbridge college heads) and smears (e.g. the ‘endless holidays’ of ‘dons’) exhibiting such a degree of intellectual dishonesty and disregard for evidence that one can at least agree that he was not very well-taught when at university. These are then explicitly linked to populist politics by pointing out that most academics opposed Brexit. That is hardly surprising: most people with a degree and even more with a higher degree did.

The irony is that British universities are extraordinarily successful in any terms they might be judged. They perform far better proportionate to either the size of the UK or the funding they receive than those of any other country in the world in terms of placement in world rankings, where the UK has 34 of the top 200 universities, and quality of research. They are intimately linked with medical and industrial innovation and the communication of culture. Moreover, they earn billions of pounds for the UK in student fee income (though this is under threat from government immigration policies). To jeopardise this in pursuit of ‘politically representative’ staffing would be, to coin a populist phrase, political correctness gone mad. Would we want, say, biologists, to be selected on the grounds of political representativeness rather than scientific ability? Is that the Lysenkoist dream of Tom Utley and the ASI? I fear that it might be.

But universities should be defended on wider grounds than this. To the extent that it is the case that they are bulwarks against populism then that is a good thing in itself. The hallmark of populism is what we are learning to call post-truth. The hallmark of universities is still that of a liberal Enlightenment commitment to truth, evidence and reason (that is so even when academics interrogate and critique the liberal Enlightenment). So it is small wonder that they are under attack from populists, and that is all the more reason to hold on tight to what they embody and represent.

Trumping rationality

This week will see the outcome of the US Presidential election, with the possibility of the victory of Donald Trump. If this occurs it will have profound consequences not just for the USA but for the world. It is hardly worth me adding to the many voices that view the prospect of a bombastic, ignorant, vicious narcissist in the White House with alarm.

But whether or not he is elected, Trump’s popularity has a significance as part of the wider rise of a nationalist populism (very evident in Brexit Britain) which can be read as the illegitimate offspring of four decades of neo-liberal globalization. Those decades, as I argue in chapter five of my book, are both the condition and consequence of much contemporary organizational practice. A key theme of nationalist populism is an angry backlash against the loss of secure employment and against immigration, both of which can be ascribed to globalization.

Hence Trump rails against NAFTA, just as Brexiters rail against the EU. At the same time, the very evident crisis of neo-liberalism that has been ongoing since 2008 has not only born down hard on employment and public spending but also opened up a profound sense of injustice and inequality. Allied with this is the idea that powerful elites – corporate, financial, political and intellectual – are profiting at the expense of and unaccountable to the people.

Something like this has become a fairly standard analysis of nationalist populism from the liberal-left (and elements of the right as well), and it clearly captures something of what is going on. However, I feel increasingly unpersuaded by it, for several reasons. Not least because under the guise of understanding, it exhibits a kind of patronizing liberal guilt: ‘those poor little people, left behind by neo-liberal globalization, of course they are angry’. That patronizes because it absolves nationalist populists from responsibility for their choices and actions. There is no reason why their reaction has to be one of vicious denigration of immigrants, for example. Nor is there any reason why it should lead to making choices which will not improve, but worsen, the lot of the left behind.

The liberal-left are often associated – by nationalist populists especially, as it happens – with ‘political correctness’, but there is a new political correctness associated with nationalist populism in which it is unsayable to call out stupidity. Because to do so is just another sign of elitism. We are ‘the people’, and you cannot question the ‘will of the people’ or you are ‘the enemy of the people’. But we are all people, and we are all equally capable of stupidity, and all equally challengeable as to the basis of what we do and think. There are not special rules for those people who proclaim themselves, and only themselves, as ‘the people’.

Nor does it make much sense to think that nationalist populism is confined to those left behind by globalization. In the US (and the UK) it seems as if something like half the electorate is willing to vote for nationalist populism. So many of them are well to do and by no means ‘left behind’ (for some fascinating data on this, see this report showing that Trump’s supporters are actually better off than most Americans). Equally, the other half of the population can hardly be described as ‘the elite’ – or if it can, that’s a hell of a big elite. And in both the US and the UK the populist leaders are themselves very obviously members of the elite, Donald Trump being an obvious example with his inherited wealth and massive business empire.

Beyond all that, nationalist populism long precedes neo-liberal globalization. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate in the 1964 Presidential contest, with whom Trump is often compared is an obvious example. So is McCarthyism, perhaps the most shameful element of Twentieth century US history. Both these comparators relate to the period of post-war US prosperity and progress whose loss is supposed to account for the nationalist populism of Trump. Going further back we can see in the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh very similar political positions. In the UK, it can be seen in Powellism and Thatcherism.

So nationalist populism has long been with us, and whatever the failings of neo-liberal globalization we should not hesitate to say that it is the wrong answer, even if to the right question. But that proposition runs into trouble for a reason which is perhaps new. The philosophical underpinnings of right and wrong answers have been substantially battered by the intellectual climate of postmodernism that is more or less coterminous with neo-liberalism. That is to say, the critique of rationality that has dominated recent decades of intellectual debate has found an unhappy partner in the ‘post-truth’ politics of nationalist populism. So evidence, expertise and rational debate can themselves be dismissed as just another way that ‘the elite’ tries to put one over on ‘the people’. It is a rich and bitter irony that the rarefied intellectual salons of 1970s Paris are being channelled to the American Rust Belt and the former mining towns of Britain. The more bitter since those Parisian salons were also where the Enlightenment was in some part born, and which had so profound a part in the formation and constitution of the United States.

Painful choices

There is so much that is painful in the world right now – events in France, Germany and Turkey come particularly to mind – that there is no shortage of things I might write under this heading. I don’t think I have ever known so depressing a time, politically, in my life. But in this post I want to focus on the particular and personal pain that I have been experiencing: dental pain. And more specifically some organizational things around that pain.

In brief, last week I developed a toothache and went to the dentist who booked me in for some treatment. Over the weekend the pain became truly agonizing – I’ve had dental pain before but nothing remotely like this – to the extent that I had to contact the out of hours doctor for some non-prescription painkillers. This process itself was organizationally painful, involving no fewer than five telephone calls, each one acting as a kind of filter. Thus on the first call I was asked a checklist of questions clearly designed to either put up red flags (‘Pains in chest? Difficulty breathing?’) or to process me to the right person.

There’s nothing objectionable about that, although I could see it leading to many false positives and negatives, except perhaps the fact that each subsequent phone call entailed repeating my symptoms and needs (in summary: ‘I’m in agony, give me some super-strong painkillers right now’ which maybe could have been passed on). But what struck me was that when it came to prescribing medicine I was told about various different possibilities and the downsides – for example potential side-effects – of these. So I asked whether or not I should take the prescribed medicine, although frankly I was in so much pain that I would have done anything, whatever the risk, up to and including amateur surgery. And the response is what I want to write about, because it was to say that what mattered was that I had been ‘made aware of the risks and so could make an informed choice’.

It seems clear to me that this has nothing to do with my making an informed choice and everything to do with organizational self-protection. If things went wrong, I could hardly complain: I had been warned of the risks. But I had no way of assessing these risks or calibrating them against the benefits and so the choice did not in any way empower me; rather, it disempowered me in the event of any problem that subsequently emerged. It reminded me of a point made in my recent book on secrecy where we argue that the ‘full transparency’ of the terms and conditions we sign up to when making online purchases is actually a form of secrecy. The T&Cs are so lengthy and complex that no one reads them or could understand them if they did, yet in the event of a problem or dispute we can be told that we had been given full information and had agreed to it by ticking the acceptance box.

Anyway, I took my medicine and all went well in that the pain was somewhat lessened and I had no unpleasant side-effects (on the contrary, a rather pleasant wooziness) and I went to the dentist again. She told me that I had a choice between having root canal surgery or an extraction and talked me through the pros and cons. A choice again, then, and this time not I think one to do with organizational self-protection but reflecting current understandings of professionalism in healthcare and other spheres. I say current understandings because in the past the norm was for health professionals to simply tell you what to do. It was a more authoritarian, paternalistic approach in which the doctor (or dentist) knew best.

That has now given way to a more patient-centred and, I suppose, consumerist ethos in which clinician and patient together make treatment decisions. The trouble is that I really don’t want this, and don’t have any basis on which to make a choice – and it is a particularly bad time to try to make choices when one is in pain. I would actually rather be told what to do: my choice is not to choose, but that wasn’t an option. So the conversation became an exercise in me trying to detect and provoke signals from the dentist as to what she actually thought was the best course of action.

It may seem a stretch, but I think this links to the post-truth politics I discussed in my recent post The Sleep of Reason where ‘expert’ opinion is derided and we have a mixture of a consumerist market for ideas and an implication that how passionately a view is held is in some way an index of its truth. For some, this is a liberation from the tyranny of authority, but it goes hand in hand with a breakdown in trust and a devaluation of rationality. Perhaps this has had some good effects. The deference shown to experts in the past was not always healthy – for example, I can remember my late father always dressing in his best clothes when he had to visit his GP which seems extraordinary to me. On the other hand, the idea that a few minutes on google can enable us to talk on equal terms with our doctors is even more bizarre. In the face of pain, at least, I am a positivist and I want someone with knowledge of the evidence to tell me what to do about it.

Oh, and for anyone interested the decision was to have root canal surgery, starting this Friday. It was my choice, but I reserve the right to moan about it. Pain does not just make me a positivist, it also exacerbates, if that is possible, my propensity to grumpiness, gloom and outright bad temper.

The sleep of reason

The expression ‘post-truth politics’ is one which I have only just become aware of, and I am not sure who coined it. The earliest usage I have found is an article about the 2012 US presidential election (Parmar, 2012) but it seems to already have been a term in use at that time.

It has come to the fore in the UK now as people begin to reflect upon the EU Referendum. Since the vote is being held today I don’t know what the outcome will be but the polls suggest the result will be close. Much of the campaign has employed familiar techniques of political rhetoric which inevitably include partial facts, selective interpretations, spinning and sloganizing of all sorts. But it has also seen repeated lies told, especially those which I have written about before concerning the size of the UK budget contribution to the EU and the assertion that Turkey is joining the EU.

It is not that telling lies in politics is new, and it isn’t that which in itself constitutes post-truth politics. It is the sense that the truth does not even matter, or that there is not even a truth to be told and, therefore, that it is meaningless to speak of lies being told. The political roots of that in the UK are associated in my mind, at least, with the way that the case was made for the Iraq War in 2003 and, more generally, with the newly relentless emphasis on ‘news management’ by the New Labour governments.

There was nothing new about spin either, of course, but this was something different. In particular, one of Tony Blair’s distinctive skills when in difficulty was to ‘break through the fourth wall’. This expression, derived from the theatre, refers to an actor speaking directly to the audience and in the process revealing the artifice of the stage. It’s just a play, after all – which we already know, but suspend our knowledge of until that knowledge is shattered. In politics this has the effect of simultaneously acknowledging but re-enforcing the idea that it is all just a game.

For skilled politicians like Blair this is a strangely disarming way of having the cake of playing the game whilst eating the cake of ironized authenticity. The blustering humour of politicians like Donald Trump or, in the Referendum context, Boris Johnson when ‘caught out’ in some particularly preposterous claim is somewhat similar. It draws the audience into a knowing acknowledgment of artifice, whilst inviting applause for the actor’s ‘honesty’ in exposing it. It’s this, rather than the telling of lies as such, which defines post-truth (and therefore post-lie) politics.

The intellectual roots of post-truth may lie with a (bowdlerized) version of post-modernism or of social constructionism: there is no truth, only interpretations. Something like this is apparent in the way that the campaign has been covered by the BBC, in particular, where a commitment to ‘balance’ has meant that every claim by one side has always been accompanied by a report of a counter-claim from the other. Again there is no truth, just opposing representations of truth; thus for every five minutes airtime saying that Turkey is not joining the EU there must be five minutes of airtime saying the opposite. Never mind that Turkey is not, as a matter of fact, joining the EU. I had a conversation at the weekend with someone about the EU debate and she suggested that whatever the facts about – in this particular conversation – immigration these didn’t matter for those concerned about it since what they claimed to be the facts were ‘true for them’ and that was what mattered.

If that is so then we have to give up on any sense of rationality in political discourse, and indeed the campaign can be read as a kind of battle between rational and post-truth politics. Thus the remain campaign deployed endless statements from various experts in economics, trade, security and so on. In response, leading leave campaigner Michael Gove opined that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”. Incredibly, he subsequently compared pro-Brexit experts to the Nazis using scientific experts to denounce Einstein’s theories as wrong, in support of anti-semitic ideology. This from a former Education Minister!

Although usually less colourfully expressed, this trope of experts being in some way corrupt or untrustworthy has run through the leave campaign. It fits very neatly – like the rest of the leave campaign – with a populism in which ‘ordinary folk’ or consistently done down by ‘the elite’ – often, the ‘liberal elite’. The logic is completely circular – the evidence that they are the elite is that they disagree; the reason they disagree is that they are the elite. In this hermetically-sealed world anyone from global corporations to trade union leaders to ‘faceless bureaucrats’ to ‘the politically correct brigade’ to ‘so-called intellectuals’ are all part of an orchestrated conspiracy. Unless, of course, someone from one of these groups comes out in favour of the populist cause, at which point they become the fount of all wisdom, ‘courageously’ speaking out.

There is an interesting and important overlap between post-truth politics and the cosmopolitan and local split which I have talked about elsewhere. For the polling evidence suggests that views on EU membership are very clearly socially stratified: the more educated people are, the more likely they are to favour EU membership; the higher their social class (which is linked to educational level) the more likely they are to favour EU membership. As with Trump’s appeal, the cleavage is between those who gain from, or at least can cope with, globalization and those who suffer from its effects. In this way, post-truth politics are inextricably linked with the consequences of neo-liberalization. And in a way there is a connection between postmodern relativism and neo-liberalism: in the marketplace of ideas you pick the one that best expresses your economic interests.

These things probably connect with the media and social media culture in which ‘passion’ is the dominant value. Thus every game show contestant is judged on how passionately they want to win, just as post-truth politicians assure us of how passionate they are about their cause. What matters most is how strongly you feel. In that calculus, it is irrelevant whether what you feel is justified by evidence or argument; the strength of the feeling is its own validation. And why not? If, as my friend told me in the conversation I mentioned earlier, what matters is what people think is true then between all the different things that people think are true the only way to adjudicate between competing beliefs is the strength with which they are held.

But there are huge dangers here. The Spanish artist Francisco Goya captioned the most famous of his Los Caprichos etchings thus: “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos). This inspired the title of The Sleep of Reason (1968) a novel by C. P. Snow about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog. It is a reminder of the dangers of the abandonment of rationality, which are just as great as those of an over-attachment to rationality – dangers which include technocracy and totalitarianism. Tomorrow we will learn whether post-truth politics have won the EU Referendum but, even if it has not, its appeal and its consequences will not disappear.

 

References

Parmar, I. (2012). ‘US Presidential Election 2012: Post-truth Politics’, Political Insight 3 (2): 4-7
Snow, C.P. (1968). The Sleep of Reason. London: Macmillan.